The Milky Way

As always, click on the photo to enlarge. If you're bored, try to count all of the stars.

The cloudy band of stars known as the Milky Way cuts diagonally across this exposure. I made the image a week ago in a remote southern Ohio forest, where light pollution is minimal. In much of the state, light pollution from towns and cities is now too intense to see many celestial objects. At this locale, on this night, the stars were visible to a degree I've seldom seen in Ohio, at least in a long time. As Carl Sagan would have said, there were "billions and billions" of stars. He wouldn't have been exaggerating. The Milky Way - our solar system - is thought to contain as many as 400 billion stars.